Pete Hines Discusses How Bethesda Designed Elder Scrolls: Blades for Mobile
The Elder Scrolls: Blades was first announced earlier this year at E3. The game will be the first major mobile title for the Elder Scrolls series, and boasts console-level graphics and other notable features. TechRadar recently spoke with Bethesda VP Pete Hines at Gamescom 2018 about the game, and how the studio brought the title to mobile devices.
Pete Hines’ Comments on The Elder Scrolls: Blades
Fans recently had the opportunity to play Elder Scrolls: Blades at Gamescom on mobile devices. At present, a release date has yet to be announced, but is expected to be before the end of the year. When it came to designing the world of The Elder Scrolls: Blades, Pete Hines explains how the game has the same Art Director as previous Elder Scrolls games; all so that the game will fit the other games with a cohesive aesthetic.
“Elder Scrolls itself has a pretty classic fantasy feel,” he says; “The art director on this game, Matthew Carofano – who was the art director of the previous three titles in the series; Skyrim, Oblivon, and Morrowind – and his team have a pretty good sense of the aesthetic they want to create for Blades in terms of it feeling familiar. We want people to feel, ‘wow, I’m playing an Elder Scrolls game but… on a phone.’ That’s intentional.”
According to Hines, one attendee who played The Elder Scrolls: Blades at E3 suspected Bethesda of streaming the game to mobile devices from a hidden computer. The level of detail and the amount of content packed into the mobile game is certainly impressive; even the combat is more advanced than one might expect. According to Hines, getting the combat right was an important priority; “We went through a lot of different iterations to get to where we are now,” he says; “There was a lot of back and forth to get it to feel right. In the end so much of it was just putting the game into people’s hands and just seeing how they intuitively thought the combat worked, and how they looked around and fought without any prompting.”